Effective communication is essential to enabling successful collaboration. It enables collaborators to build common ground, to foster ideas, to develop the complex interpersonal relationships that facilitate effective interactions, and more. In the modern workplace, successful collaboration translates into improved productivity, creativity, and the overall well-being of workers. An important aspect of effective communication is having ongoing group awareness, which includes knowledge of where co-workers are located.
Fostering group awareness has become an increasingly difficult challenge in today's modern workplaces. Workers may have flexible schedules (e.g., working outside the typical 9-6 workday, working in different time zones, etc.) or may work from remote locations (e.g., such as distributed work locations, client sites, at home, public places, etc.). Moreover, even when a worker is present in the same building, the worker may not be in a designated work space. Accordingly, determining group awareness of co-workers is difficult, time consuming, and error prone. Thus, it is highly desirable to provide a system and method for determining a location of a person without the aforementioned problems.